The Little Daisy

Intel RealSense Challenge 2014

“Little Daisy” is controlled with your hands. Use them to protect the flower from sour rain, sun, smoke and help it to survive. A big part of the experience is to explore how to interact with the flower itself. By moving one or both hands into the interaction space of the RealSense camera, the user manipulates the environment. Several scenes provide the user with the chance to help the flower grow, blossom, and fight against pollution. Text overlays give hints on how to interact and also introduces issues of environmental topics.

“Little Daisy” deals with today’s questions of environmental responsibility and focuses the user’s emotion into a personification of nature – a little flower. Players help it to survive the daily struggle against pollution and human impact. However, in the end, they have to accept that a digital simulation alone is not enough to help the environment; they have to go out and actually make a difference.

The application is built using Unity3D and MonoDevelop. We enhanced the hand tracking capabilites of the RealSense SDK with some custom code and behaviours to allow for more flexible control. Our goal for the interaction design was to provide an extremely simple way for people to interact – their hands work like magnets, attracting clouds, the sun and other environmental objects. Thus, we decided to not implement all of the RealSense SDK features, but only the ones which benefit our idea of allowing people of all technical levels to experience the application and receive our message.